He’s not a thug, he doesn’t trust his celebrity friends, and he’s definitelynot a pornographer. Over a cigar delivered on a silver platter, the self-appointed king of Express Newspapers lays into scruffy booksellers and sets the record straight

Richard Desmond held a party at Claridge’s in Mayfair this week to launch his autobiography. “Everybody” was there – “Jacob Rothschild came, Katie Price came, Barbara Windsor came. It was a whole cross-section of everybody. Lovely.” One person who was not there for long, though, was the man from Waterstones staffing the book stand.

“I walk in, and I see this bloke, this scruffy bloke. He’s in like a real old sweater with holes in it, jeans with holes in.” Desmond’s nose wrinkles. “I said to him, ‘Look, mate, you’ve got lords and ladies coming here, and international celebrities, and my friends and family. I don’t really want to see you look like that. Have you got a suit?’ ‘No.’ ‘Would you go out and get a suit?’ ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well then, mate, fuck off.’ I got one of my advertising girls to sell the books instead.” He turns to his PR. “Was I harsh?” The PR demurs respectfully. “Oh no, it was about principle.” It all worked out for the best, Desmond agrees happily, because the man “learned a lesson”, will tell everyone, “Oh, this guy was so aggressive to me, he threatened to kill me,” and thus “another myth” about the media tycoon’s violent temper will be born. “Well, that’s the point.”

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Desmond has been myth-making for almost 50 years, and his flair for notoriety has made him one of the richest men in Britain. Only last week, Twitter was agog over an interview the billionaire gave to the FT, during which he ordered a £580 bottle of wine at the newspaper’s expense. He looks genuinely hurt when I mention this, and claims he had offered to pay for the lunch, so assumed he would be picking up the bill. Then he spreads his arms and beams. “Actually, it’s probably good [the journalist] didn’t say that, because it maintains the image of some horrible bloke. I mean, how else are you going to get your book talked about? It’s showbiz! It’s fish-and-chip paper. Doesn’t matter.” Later I check with the journalist, who says the offer to pay is categorically untrue. I am not wholly surprised. But nor am I sure that Desmond believed he was lying when he told me otherwise.

When every conversation is a sale, and only winning counts, the distinction between truth and deceit can be become largely irrelevant. The billionaire’s autobiography – which was the happy recipient of a five-star review in the Daily Express this week – is a masterclass in how to lie your way to the top, beginning with his job in a nightclub cloakroom at the age of just 13, where he devised a scam to duplicate coat tickets and pocket the money. His pornography empire – Penthouse, Big Ones, Asian Babes etc – not only sold fake sex, but duped creditors into assuming he must be richer than he was. “Because when we went to buy the Express, I said, ‘Well, we’re in the adult business, we’ve got billions.’ We just thought, how stupid people are, they have no idea.” In reality, he snorts, his infamous Asian Babes title sold barely 3,000 copies a month. His OK! magazine has proved more successful, not least by routinely featuring “intimate” celebrity weddings attended by bridesmaids selected for their circulation-boosting fame, who barely even knew the bride.

Richard Desmond with wife, Joy, and son, Valentine, at the launch party for his autobiography at Claridge’s in London. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty

In his palatial penthouse office overlooking Tower Bridge, staffed by a butler, the magnate brings to mind Augustus Melmotte from Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now – a magnificent fictional creation, in every sense, who rises from humble origins to deceive and dazzle London with calculated displays of wealth and power. “Got to have a strong image,” Desmond murmurs, sipping fennel tea. As he sees it, sales always justify artifice, and his artfully constructed myths have made him rich only because they are ones we want to buy. He much prefers his Range Rover to his Rolls-Royce, he confides by way of example, but it was the latter he parked outside Claridge’s for his party. “Because that’s what people want to see. People would be disappointed if they didn’t.”

But today he seems to be feeling ambivalent about his fearsome reputation. He is on a concerted charm offensive, and could not be more solicitous or courteous. What would I like to drink? Would I like to smoke? Let’s smoke! The butler is summoned, bearing a cigar on a silver platter. He accepts my compliment on his office graciously – “Big and glamorous, yes. Of course. We’re in showbiz, aren’t we?” – and compliments my posture. “You sit up very well. Got the back straight. I slouch.” He turns to his PR. “You slouch?” “Yes, I slouch.”

All these stories of him threatening journalists are “just a laugh”, he assures me. He speaks very softly, barely moving his lips. “Just a bit of fun.” Desmond once paid damages to a former executive editor on the Express who claimed the proprietor punched him in the stomach, but he goes on smoothly, “I hate to admit this, but I’ve never actually hit anyone. I don’t even kill wasps or spiders. I’m pretty veggie as well. In fact, really, I’m New Age.”

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It is true, he concedes, that he used to rate employees’ contributions to meetings by sounding a bell or a hooter while they were mid-sentence. But he got bored of that, “So now all we have is a racing track.” A what? “Shall we show you?” Chuckling, he picks up the phone and summons his loyal lieutenant, group joint managing editor Martin Elice, who appears a minute later carrying a child’s cardboard cut-out of a Formula One race track. Miniature cardboard vehicles are positioned on the track, each bearing a photograph of a board member’s face. One is driving Thomas the Tank Engine, another a bicycle, another a lawnmower, but Desmond’s face has been stuck on to a Rolls, and is way out in the lead. Elice places the model track carefully before me and tries to explain how it works.

“Quite a few people are on the start line, here, because they’ve not got off the start yet. And you can see,” he indicates, leaning over, “that Richard is streaking ahead here.” Some directors appear to be at a disadvantage, vehicle-wise, I suggest. “Well, I think they’re cheating, actually,” Elice says. “Let’s move them back,” agrees Desmond, “a little bit.”

Enjoying my bewilderment, the boss explains that if someone makes a good point in a meeting, he moves their face forward on the track. “But sometimes they fuck up, so it goes back.” “Yes,” Elice giggles. “You’re backwards and forwards all the time, we don’t stand still. Every day is different, as you probably know in your business. One day you’re interviewing some person. And the next, you’re interviewing the emperor!” I look at Desmond. “Are you the emperor?” He looks at Elice. “Am I the emperor?” “The king,” suggests Elice. “The king,” Desmond repeats. “Fantastic.” Would he mind if I took a photo of the track? He hesitates, then shakes his head. “People might think we’re potty. We wouldn’t want people to think we’re potty.”

Desmond’s style of management has not generated universal amusement among his employees. One of the early resignations from the Express was the columnist Stephen Pollard, who left his feelings encoded within his final leader column. The first letter of each sentence spelt out: “FUCK YOU DESMOND”. It was Rupert Murdoch who alerted the paper’s new proprietor to the insult. “He called me at about five in the morning. He was furious about it. I didn’t even know what a leader column was then. No, because I’m a businessman, I’m a publisher, I’m not an editor.” Was he very angry? “No, confused. I was really confused.” Affecting injured innocence, he puzzles meekly, “Why did he do it? Why did he do it?”

Anyone would think Desmond quite oblivious to the outrage that greeted his acquisition of the Daily Express in 2000. The dismay might have been even more widespread, I suspect, if the full story now revealed in his book had been known at the time. Key players in the chain of events included Jeremy Beadle, Alan Sugar, Barbara Windsor, and the wife of an Arsenal director who was so thrilled to receive a personal thank-you note from Desmond after switching her subscription from Hello! magazine to OK! that her husband helped persuade Lord Hollick to sell him the paper. The tale reads like a Private Eye parody of how matters of national importance are conducted in modern Britain.

But at the time, it was the publisher’s extensive porn empire that cast doubt on his suitability as a national newspaper owner. According to his autobiography, he diversified from magazines about music, cycling and other wholesome hobbies into soft-porn titles, adult TV stations and premium-rate phone sex lines almost by accident. New business opportunities just chanced to come his way, too commercially attractive to pass up. He takes such care to present himself as a reluctant pornographer that I wonder if he wishes he could have made his millions through other means.

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“No, because I made money in all sectors of the media.” Then why does he take great offence when described as a pornographer? “Well, it’s not correct. Pornography, if you look at the technical thing, is illegal.” I’m unaware of any definition of porn that mentions illegality. “Well, that’s the perception of me, as a bloke from Hampstead Garden Suburb. To me, pornography’s illegal, druggy, back streets, prostitution, you know.” The temperature in the room is plummeting. “To me,” he maintains frostily, “we were the publishers of adult magazines. That’s it. We’re a broad-based publishing group. I mean, Rupert Murdoch has more adult stations on Sky than anyone else, but you don’t call him a pornographer, because it’s part of the mix.”

Is porn a good thing? “It’s part of the mix.” I didn’t mean good in the commercial sense. Does he consider it fundamentally positive? “I personally don’t like hardcore pornography. I don’t like it. I think it’s a bit crude. But watching the Fantasy Channel on Sky, yes. I think it’s fun, a bit of fun. That’s fine.” Does he watch it himself? “Definitely. Everyone should watch it.” His stare becomes teasingly ironic. “I watch it every night from 10 o’clock to 5.30. That’s all I do.”

He sold his porn magazines in 2004, and his favourite TV shows are actually Minder and The Sweeney (“proper TV”). If he could read just one daily paper, excluding his own titles, it would be the Guardian. “No, I’m not joking. I like the Guardian.” Why? “I think it tells the truth.” His contempt for “intellectual geezers in Hampstead” nonetheless remains uncontainable. His ex-wife made him see a therapist once, who fitted the description, and “fucking hell, I was so bored. It was a load of rubbish. I thought, ‘Fuck this’,” and after half an hour he walked out.

Domestic life for Desmond has undergone a radical transformation since his first marriage of 27 years ended in 2009. His eldest son is in his 20s, but he now has a four-year-old-daughter and six-month-old son with his second wife, an American called Joy, who he met in a BA lounge. He mentions his new family at every opportunity, with the tender delight common in men finding fatherhood more enjoyable the second time around, so I ask if he has changed as a parent. “I am the world’s greatest father.” When I take this to mean he changes nappies, he looks appalled. “No, no. Never done that,” – nor bathtime, nor burping, nor night feeds. So his role is … ? “Breadwinner, mate. I’m the breadwinner.”

Have you been to the House of Lords? Would you really want to sit there with all those old tosspots?

At 62, the big change he has sensed himself is: “You want to make your mark, you want to try and make the world a better place.” Having made substantial donations to both Labour and the Tories in the past, earlier this year he caused a political sensation by giving Ukip £1m, along with his papers’ endorsement in the general election. Senior Tories put it down to revenge for their party’s failure to reward his support with a peerage.

“That is not true. I’ve been offered a peerage already, and turned it down.” By this, he means that Tony Blair once asked his wife how Lady Desmond would sound, and she was unimpressed. “I mean,” he goes on, “have you been to the House of Lords? Would you really want to sit there with all those old tosspots?” But by Desmond’s own admission, he isn’t even sure he wants Britain to leave the EU, so why give Ukip all that money? “What I got, right, is exactly what I wanted – which is an EU referendum. You can thank me for that. Without me and my papers keeping Ukip alive, they were dead.”

Personally, I’m not convinced that Desmond has political ambitions. He doesn’t dispute my assumption that he has thought about running for London mayor. “But it would drive me mad. All those questions? You’d never get anything done.” He likes Boris Johnson (“he’s fun, he’s a good bloke”), but wouldn’t want him to succeed David Cameron. “Have you seen outside my building?” It is a giant tangle of scaffolding and bollards. “I mean, what the fuck is that?” He would prefer Michael Gove. “Strong, sensible, not too political.” His impulse to “make a difference” finds a much happier fit in charity, which he adores, than it does in Westminster. My impression from his book is that his philanthropy has served his own commercial self-interest – charity dinners figure heavily in almost all his business deals and contacts – but this causes no offence. “The more I give,” he agrees, “the richer I seem to get!”

Desmond has been rich for most of his life. In his teens, as an advertising salesman, he was already earning more than most people twice his age, and last year his personal fortune was valued at £1.2bn. And yet he still doesn’t feel rich. “I feel comfortable.” How much more money would he want? “Oh,” he says casually, “I have never been in it for the money.” Having seldom met anyone more motivated by profit, I mistake this for just another of his theatrical lies, and don’t realise until later what he means. He has never been greedy for wealth, but only haunted by terror of losing everything.

Desmond’s early childhood of affluent privilege in a north London suburb came to a shattering end when his father lost his hearing, and with it his glamorous job as an advertising executive for Pearl and Dean. Abandoned by former colleagues and friends, he developed a gambling addiction, which destroyed his marriage and bankrupted the family. By the age of 12, Desmond was living with his divorced mother in a grotty little flat, disgraced by poverty and shunned by wealthier school friends. “It was horrible. It wasn’t fair.”

It’s always the people who say, ‘We’re so loyal to you, you can trust us.’ They’re the ones. They’re out to kill you

He attributes his fanatical drive to the humiliation of his childhood, but I suspect his father’s downfall also explains his volatile rage. For someone who claims to promote and delight in a reputation as a cold, commercial monster, he is extraordinarily sensitive to any perceived slight. “Nothing pisses me off more than people not returning your calls, not returning your emails. I mean, what the fuck?” If someone arrives late for a meeting, he takes it is a personal insult, and will never forget.

The last thing I expected to feel for Desmond was compassion. But when he talks about the memory of watching his father’s friends desert him, an agony that still burns him to this day, I worry about all the B-list celebrities Desmond boasts of as “great friends” in his book. Does he ever wonder, I venture, which of them would stand by him if he lost everything?

“All the time,” he nods grimly. “Of course, of course.” He thinks no more than a third would stick around. “And it’s always the people,” he observes bitterly, “who say, ‘We’re so loyal to you, you can trust us, I’d never let you down.’ They’re the ones. They’re out to kill you.”